That's true, but if you sell or give someone a knife with reason to believe that they're going to use it to stab someone, and then they do, you can still be prosecuted for it. Same goes for anything else - if you have reason to believe that someone is going to commit a crime, and you provide them with the means to do so, you may well be liable.
You're not allowed to carry a knife with a blade above a certain length (which iirc is about 3") without reason - such as you're a chef and they're your knives, you've just bought them and/or are taking them home, etc.
Of course it's not illegal to own kitchen knives in England! Every iron monger's and supermarket in the country sell them - what on earth do you think we cut food with?
And who installs software, updates, etc on the "dumb users'" PC? You? Me? Some central administrative service (for a convenient monthly fee)? Bill Gates himself?
Removing admin access from the average user isn't going to happen, because most of them own the computer and are solely responsible for it. You can do it at work, but at home it simply isn't going to happen.
You can't just change the filename into photo.jpg or letter.doc to make the attachment look like a photo or a word document.
You can't do that on Windows, either. If the user has file extensions switched off, that'll be the only file with an extension. If they have them switched on, thay'll see the real extension. Either way, the icon will match the real extension.
Somebody would have to be incredibly naive to ignore all the warnings and still proceed.
How many email viruses have hit the headlines? I mean the real, honest-to-goodness normal newspaper headlines? Yet, people still run unknown executables from untrusted sources. Do not underestimate user stupidity.
Besides which, it's *trivial* to get a user to run an executable - just convince them it's something they want. A cool new screensaver, or handy little systray (or equivalent) applet, or a way to get cheap/free porn, or whatever. You don't have to be able to get *every* user to run it, just *some* users.
Hell, there are viruses that email themselves out as *password-protected* zip file attachments. People still save the zip file, open it, enter the password from the email and run the executable.
If a user can execute aribtrary code on their computer, it can be infected. If they can't, then imho they might as well toss it in the bin anyway.
the default Windows XP theme was the ugliest Windows UI since Windows 2.1
That's entirely subjective; personally, having used XP, I find the Win2k UI ugly (and in fact stopped using Mandrake because I prefered the look of the XP UI).
the minimal reasonable requirement... 512MB is for XP
No; my parents' XP machine had 128MB and was fine until they installed AV soft and a third-party firewall. Even then 256MB would've been fine. Of course, it depends on what you mean by "real work". They mean email, surfing the web, viewing/printing photos, etc.
If it works, don't break it.
Finally, something we agree on;-)
I spend 10 hours+ a day staring at my monitor; what's on it had better be visually pleasing. For me, at the moment, that means XP or possibly Mac OS X. I own a copy of XP; I don't have the £1.5k+ to buy a Mac, or anything I could do with it that I can't do with my current PC.
Precisely - whether you're running 50 copies of calc.exe or 50 distinct apps, if they're all using the.NET runtime, you'll have one copy of the CLR and one of each required dll loaded.
That "feature" has caused many newbies to double-click on what they think is a.jpg or.doc, only to find out that it's really an.exe that will screw up their system.
Well, they're stupid:
1) the icon is wrong (it matches the actual extension) 2) *none* of their other files have an extension, they probably don't know what an extension *is*, yet they trust the only extension they can see over the file's icon
one of the first things I have to do is to make the file extensions visible
As do I, along with showing hidden and system files, etc. Then again, I'm a power user, and most definitely not the intended target of that sort of default setting (or indeed, many default settings)
Would you agree that the second is of a lesser degree.
Not really, no. Either way, the rightful copyright holder's rights have been violated, and either way - whether the violator is making money or not - the copyright holder isn't. (Yes, it's arguable as to wether every copy is a lost sale, but at least some of them will be).
Sharing movies only hurts the people trying to make money from selling (access to) movies. In most cases yes, that's a "bigass company", but some movies are made by small groups of individuals.
In either case, even "bigass companies" are just large groups of individuals; do you have a size limit above which it's ok to infringe on copyrights? 10 people? 100?
No, he can licence it to other people under a different licence, and he can stop distributing it under the GPL, but he can't revoke licences that have already been granted.
If I write some code and give it to you under the GPL, then sell it to IBM/Apple/MS, you still have your GPLed copy with all the rights that affords you.
Never mind that - how exactly do you propose I use video talk in the middle of a crowded office?
Even if the conversation is work-related, I run the risk of annoying everyone within earshot as they try to concentrate on something else in the face of a rising level of background noise.
I had exactly the same thing happen to me, with the same solution (uninstall, reinstall). I even tried rebooting to see if it had done something really stupid...
You contribute by commenting. How many people would read slashdot if people couldn't discuss the articles? How much ad and subscription revenue would slashdot get in that case?
Netscape 4 was *not* still good in 2000. I used it exclusively, but only because I was too much of an anti-MS zealot to use IE (now I'm too used to Gecko-based browsers to use IE 6, but I digress).
NN 4 crashed at the drop of a hat, was dog-slow at rendering anything even vaguely complicated, and had to reload the page to resize it (which is utterly, utterly unforgivable).
Slashdot Mirror
So is any other site that carries advertising, including slashdot and google, to a greater or lesser extent
Precisely his point.
People die of ebola; millions died of smallpox. How many have died as a direct result of computer viruses? A handful? Any?
That's true, but if you sell or give someone a knife with reason to believe that they're going to use it to stab someone, and then they do, you can still be prosecuted for it. Same goes for anything else - if you have reason to believe that someone is going to commit a crime, and you provide them with the means to do so, you may well be liable.
(Disclaimer: no, of course I'm not a lawyer)
You're not allowed to carry a knife with a blade above a certain length (which iirc is about 3") without reason - such as you're a chef and they're your knives, you've just bought them and/or are taking them home, etc.
Of course it's not illegal to own kitchen knives in England! Every iron monger's and supermarket in the country sell them - what on earth do you think we cut food with?
And who installs software, updates, etc on the "dumb users'" PC? You? Me? Some central administrative service (for a convenient monthly fee)? Bill Gates himself?
Removing admin access from the average user isn't going to happen, because most of them own the computer and are solely responsible for it. You can do it at work, but at home it simply isn't going to happen.
Viruses load themselves into memory and infect other files.
Trojans only run when you launch them.
No, viruses only run when you run their host executable. The difference between a trojan and a virus is that a virus
a) most likely wasn't put there by the original author of the host file
b) seeks out and infects other files
You can't just change the filename into photo.jpg or letter.doc to make the attachment look like a photo or a word document.
You can't do that on Windows, either. If the user has file extensions switched off, that'll be the only file with an extension. If they have them switched on, thay'll see the real extension. Either way, the icon will match the real extension.
Somebody would have to be incredibly naive to ignore all the warnings and still proceed.
How many email viruses have hit the headlines? I mean the real, honest-to-goodness normal newspaper headlines? Yet, people still run unknown executables from untrusted sources. Do not underestimate user stupidity.
Besides which, it's *trivial* to get a user to run an executable - just convince them it's something they want. A cool new screensaver, or handy little systray (or equivalent) applet, or a way to get cheap/free porn, or whatever. You don't have to be able to get *every* user to run it, just *some* users.
Hell, there are viruses that email themselves out as *password-protected* zip file attachments. People still save the zip file, open it, enter the password from the email and run the executable.
If a user can execute aribtrary code on their computer, it can be infected. If they can't, then imho they might as well toss it in the bin anyway.
Its like those "A system error has occurred" messages. They assume you're too stupid to tell which error actually happened.
Or perhaps, the underlying code has just thrown up a generic "shit happened" error, and so the UI code doesn't know what happened?
I've seen that often enough in library code specifically aimed at developers...
the default Windows XP theme was the ugliest Windows UI since Windows 2.1
;-)
That's entirely subjective; personally, having used XP, I find the Win2k UI ugly (and in fact stopped using Mandrake because I prefered the look of the XP UI).
the minimal reasonable requirement... 512MB is for XP
No; my parents' XP machine had 128MB and was fine until they installed AV soft and a third-party firewall. Even then 256MB would've been fine. Of course, it depends on what you mean by "real work". They mean email, surfing the web, viewing/printing photos, etc.
If it works, don't break it.
Finally, something we agree on
I spend 10 hours+ a day staring at my monitor; what's on it had better be visually pleasing. For me, at the moment, that means XP or possibly Mac OS X. I own a copy of XP; I don't have the £1.5k+ to buy a Mac, or anything I could do with it that I can't do with my current PC.
Precisely - whether you're running 50 copies of calc.exe or 50 distinct apps, if they're all using the .NET runtime, you'll have one copy of the CLR and one of each required dll loaded.
That "feature" has caused many newbies to double-click on what they think is a .jpg or .doc, only to find out that it's really an .exe that will screw up their system.
Well, they're stupid:
1) the icon is wrong (it matches the actual extension)
2) *none* of their other files have an extension, they probably don't know what an extension *is*, yet they trust the only extension they can see over the file's icon
one of the first things I have to do is to make the file extensions visible
As do I, along with showing hidden and system files, etc. Then again, I'm a power user, and most definitely not the intended target of that sort of default setting (or indeed, many default settings)
Why, that's as bad as "M$" and "Windoze".
What, have people never heard of tab completion?
Would you agree that the second is of a lesser degree.
Not really, no. Either way, the rightful copyright holder's rights have been violated, and either way - whether the violator is making money or not - the copyright holder isn't. (Yes, it's arguable as to wether every copy is a lost sale, but at least some of them will be).
Sharing movies only hurts bigass companies
Sharing movies only hurts the people trying to make money from selling (access to) movies. In most cases yes, that's a "bigass company", but some movies are made by small groups of individuals.
In either case, even "bigass companies" are just large groups of individuals; do you have a size limit above which it's ok to infringe on copyrights? 10 people? 100?
No, he can licence it to other people under a different licence, and he can stop distributing it under the GPL, but he can't revoke licences that have already been granted.
If I write some code and give it to you under the GPL, then sell it to IBM/Apple/MS, you still have your GPLed copy with all the rights that affords you.
Were the misspellings of "impure", "grammar" and "ought" deliberate, in order to further illustrate your point? ;-)
Never mind that - how exactly do you propose I use video talk in the middle of a crowded office?
Even if the conversation is work-related, I run the risk of annoying everyone within earshot as they try to concentrate on something else in the face of a rising level of background noise.
I had exactly the same thing happen to me, with the same solution (uninstall, reinstall). I even tried rebooting to see if it had done something really stupid...
So, RealPlayer plays wmv files? I wasn't aware that it played anything other than Real files, CDs and DVDs...
I haven't travelled in the US, but I have in Europe, and I never noticed a single homeless person there
Come to a big English city (especially London) and wander around for a bit - you'll likely see a few.
You contribute by commenting. How many people would read slashdot if people couldn't discuss the articles? How much ad and subscription revenue would slashdot get in that case?
I'd mod ya down if I werent replying, but not because you're pro intel, just because your logic is flawed.
But slashdot doesn't have a "-1, Stupid (and Wrong)" moderation, more's the pity...
Netscape 4 was still good in 2000.
Netscape 4 was *not* still good in 2000. I used it exclusively, but only because I was too much of an anti-MS zealot to use IE (now I'm too used to Gecko-based browsers to use IE 6, but I digress).
NN 4 crashed at the drop of a hat, was dog-slow at rendering anything even vaguely complicated, and had to reload the page to resize it (which is utterly, utterly unforgivable).